“Ready?” Matt asks, standing by our entryway and holding our dog Mabel’s leash in his hand.
“Yeah, just need to get my shoes on,” I tell him.
“Are you going for a walk?” Annalee jumps up. “Can I come too?”
We think about it for half a second then say, “Sure.” It won’t be the quiet, connecting conversation we usually have at the end of the day, but that’s okay.
“I want to come!” Wyatt adds, putting the book he was reading down. Matt and I exchange a quick glance. Whenever our kids join us–especially Wyatt–there are so many questions, the conversation feels like a quiz show. Time to shift our brains into gear.
We make our way along the forest road, down toward the river instead of along the busy main street we usually walk down. It’s already darker than I would prefer for taking this route, but it’s definitely prettier and more peaceful. At the top of the hill, Annalee remembers seeing a ladybug with a different pattern on the pole of the street sign.
“Are all ladybugs girls?” she asks. The quiz show has begun. Fortunately, I’ve got this one.
“Nope,” I answer. Easy.
“Well, then why are they called lady-bugs?” Ah, I should have anticipated this.
“I… uh… honestly don’t know.” Kids:1, parents: 0.
We cross the road and make our way along a path that goes between grave mounds. Here in Korea, these mounds are ubiquitous, rising up right next to houses or rice paddies or along mountain paths or beside vegetable gardens. I’ve always found it interesting, the proximity of death to everyday life, not disconnected and foreign as it is in America.
“Why are Korean graves in mounds?” Matt asks, and Wyatt says that a friend told him it’s because they bury people in sitting positions.
“I thought the Vikings did that, at least some of the time,” I say, remembering something from Sticks Across the Chimney, a book all my kids loved.
“Oh yeah. Well, I don’t know, actually,” Wyatt replies.
“We’ll look it up when we get home.” I tell him.1 We walk through some woods in the direction of the setting sun. There’s just a hint of light on the horizon now.
“Hey, Mama. Why does the American military not use canard wings on their jets?” Wyatt asks. His questions are always the zingers.
“I have no idea. That is one-hundred percent a question for your dad.” His dad is a licensed pilot who has flown for the US military. I, on the other hand, only know what a canard wing even is because of a question Matt answered on an earlier day. Matt answers him with a few possibilities.
It’s dark by the time we get to the river trail.
“Why is the sky light over there,” Annalee points ahead of us with one hand, “when the sun just went down over there?” Now she points to the side. Whew, another easy question.
“Because the city is over there, and the lights from it are reflecting on the clouds. See the line of clouds?” We tilt our necks toward the sky, and Annalee nods and hmms before launching into a story about her day and who was rude in her class and who she played with on the playground.
"How did I wake up with you the morning after I was born?" Another easy question, thank goodness, and so out of nowhere, it surprises me. I smile at the precious memory.
"Right here," I tell her, crooking my arm and showing her the space beneath it. "You lay right here, and then you cried a little, and I nursed you." She’s quiet for a few minutes, then says, “Did you know that Julie’s2 mommy had a baby that died in her tummy?”
Yes, I do know that. My friend has shared that story with me. But even so, the words fall heavy like rocks on my chest. “I know a lot of people have had that happen. It’s very, very sad,” I reply.
At my postpartum checkup after Annalee, a nurse asked how many pregnancies I’d had and how many live births. Five and five, I told her. She looked up at me from her chart and said, “Wow! That’s remarkable! You’re very lucky!” I nodded quietly in reply, unsure of what to say.
I always tell people I don’t believe in luck or karma. But with every pregnancy, in the darkest hours of the night, I wondered if I was wrong, and maybe this time, my luck would run out. With pregnancies spread out over almost sixteen years, I knew of more heartbreak every time I saw a positive pregnancy test. When each baby was safely in my arms, gratitude made me weep. But guilt also twisted in my gut. Who was I to have this gift? I’d done nothing to deserve it.
“Nana lost a baby once,” I tell my kids. It’s so dark out here along the river, and the lamps along the trail spill circles of light onto the pavement.
“What?!” My kids are so shocked, their voices almost make me jump. “When?!”
“Before she had Aunt Jenny.” They look at me with wide eyes, their minds truly blown.
“So you have a brother or sister you don’t even know?” Wyatt asks. “Does that make you sad?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “It was before I was born. My mom got pregnant with Aunt Jenny right after she lost that baby, so if she could have had that one, I wouldn’t have my sister. And my sister is all I’ve ever known. I love her so much. I mean, she was my first best friend! So…” My voice trails off, and we walk in silence for a while. The kids are clearly shaken by this alternative reality without their beloved aunt while trying to reconcile their sadness at the loss of a relative they never knew.
“Why does God let things like that happen?” Wyatt asks, anger sharpening his words. “Why does He let babies die?” It’s not the first time he’s asked this, but I still don’t know exactly what to tell him. I don’t know that I ever will. Matt answers that we live in a broken world, and Wyatt snaps, “Well, then why doesn’t God just fix it?” I tell him the Bible verses I’ve said before, and I remind him now how Jesus wept because of death. Matt points out that God sees more than we do, as He told Job.
“If we didn’t have Aunt Jenny, you wouldn’t have your cousins,” I add, as gently as I can.
None of our words come easily. I was born in Bangladesh when it had the highest infant mortality rate, and the sight of children with stick-like limbs and orange-tinted hair, hallmarks of malnutrition, was all too common for me growing up. Every day, we’re sickened by the horrors happening in Ukraine and of sweet children just like ours killed in schools and on playgrounds where they were supposed to be safe.
“Why does He let babies die?” My son’s question echoes in her mind.
I remember a day when I was newly pregnant with Lilly. We lived in Pacific Grove, California at the time, and I used to walk every day with a good friend. Our route took us along the Ocean View Trail, past harbor seals lying on the small, rocky beaches. One day, I heard a seagulls squawking and looked toward the sound. The birds were circling a small strip of sand, swooping down at turns as a seal lunged awkwardly toward them. Beside her lay the still form of her pup, bloody afterbirth strewn across the shells. Everything in me wanted to run to the beach and chase the gulls away, granting the mother seal quiet for her grief.
“I don’t know,” I say again, “but I believe He is with us in our pain. And He wants us to help others who are hurting.”
We turn off the river trail and walk along the narrow rice paddy road. It’s darker than I expected. So much of Korea is brightly lit by neon and fluorescence. Even hiking trails through the forest are illuminated, as we discovered by accident once several years ago on a calamitous trek through Apsan National Park near Daegu. But there are no lights here in the fields, and deep ditches line the narrow pavement. Something squeaks loud from the darkness, and we quicken our steps, then laugh at how jumpy we are. I try to plot escape routes if a car speeds toward us until we are back to the path that goes off the road and past the graves. This, too, feels ominous, but I know it’s only because of superstitions. My friend Elizabeth once told me about another neighbor who asked his realtor about his home’s proximity to some graves.
“Don’t worry,” the realtor told him. “Korean ghosts are friendly.”
I laugh inwardly at the memory, even as the shadows of the grave mounds loom around us.
“I know,” Wyatt finally says as we are on the last stretch of road to our home. He’s been thinking about our conversation in silence. He gives a gusty sigh and says, “I know,” again. “Loving God even with the bad stuff is what matters. It’s like you always say, ‘A love that is demanded is no love at all.’” That’s a line from Veggie Tales’ A Snoodle’s Tale, a thirty-minute kids’ show from about twenty years ago, with perhaps the most profound theology distilled into a simple, ten-word sentence. “It’s just sometimes hard to understand. There’s so much bad, it scares me and makes me sad.”
“I know, buddy” I tell him. “Same here. But there’s a lot of good too, don’t forget that.”
We’re back at our front door, and we stumble inside where it’s bright and warm, where we are safe. The quiz show is over, at least for now. We gave the best answers we knew.
This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Overheard at Home"
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Wyatt’s answer was not correct. Koreans traditionally bury their dead standing up. Read more about it here. And I highly recommend Sticks Across the Chimney for an exciting kids’ book with Viking history.
Name changed to protect privacy.
This was SO SO GOOD. Wow. DEEP.
So honest. I love all the thoughtful questions your kids are asking (most of them I also do not have answers to!) Your imagery here was really beautiful and vivid. Thanks for sharing, Joy.